


For A God To Die

by interestinggin



Category: American Gods (TV), American Gods - Neil Gaiman, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: American Gods Inspired, Canonical Character Death, Crossover, Gen, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-01
Updated: 2013-11-01
Packaged: 2017-12-31 05:14:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1027653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/interestinggin/pseuds/interestinggin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I just keep thinking about Thor... Not bright, but he’d give you the goddamned shirt off his back if you asked him. And he killed himself. He put a gun in his mouth and blew his head off in Philadelphia in 1932. What kind of way is that for a god to die?”</p><p>This is a bad land for gods, and Loki can't work out what brought them here at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For A God To Die

**Author's Note:**

> This work was inspired by the spectacular graphics of [azriels](http://azriels.tumblr.com/tagged/american-gods), and written with kind permission.

_'His gods were already waiting for him when he arrived: Tyr, one-handed, and gray Odin gallows-god, and Thor of the thunders._

_They were there._

_They were waiting.'_

 

The gods remember. They always do.

It is a fiction, and a cruel one, to say that the gods do not watch us; they watch, and remember, every fallen leaf and wasted life. To them we are not playthings, but curiosities, to be gently handled and carefully stored. And they remember every life that was lived, and they remember those that never were as well.

No man dies forgotten. But when a god dies, they die unmourned, unremembered; they die as if they never were, and no-one holds their vigil.

No, it is not a blessing, to be born a god.

 

Loki remembers.

He remembers a world where he did not want to leave Asgard; where he followed them across Ginnungagap and the seemingly endless plains of the ocean, followed those who had revered him as a creature of belief and given him strength to build his powers high, to a land that seemed too silent for him. A bad place for gods. There would be no home for him here.

“We should not have come here,” he'd murmured quietly to Thor, one hand tangled in the other’s hair. “It will not end fortuitously.”

Of course, he did not say that, not really. He spoke in a tongue that could be understood by his people; garbled and beautiful and old and dark. The men wore helmets that could only ever be a mockery of his horns, and the women told stories of his deeds to their young as warnings and fables. They brought Thor to America in their prayers; they brought Loki in their dreams.

“ _Be not unmanly, lads_ ,” they would counsel, “ _for Loki walks abroad today, and mischief is at hand_.”

“You worry too much, Lie-Smith,” said Thor, with that endless, bloodsoaked grin on his lips, “for Odin led us here, and has he led us astray before?”

Loki considered the world where he explained that yes, in fact; in a thousand other lifetimes the gallows-rider had led them like sheep to ruin and oblivion, and everything a god fears most, and then decided not to live that life.

Loki laughed.

“You must be right, Thunderer,” he replied, smiling softly. “Hail Odin.”

“Hail,” Thor agreed. The mortals cracked open mead barrels and toasted their good fortune; the gods, thirsty as vultures, drank the belief down deep.

 

_'I told you I would tell you my names. This is what they call me. I'm called Glad-of-War, Grim, Raider, and Third. I am One-Eyed. I am called Highest, and True-Guesser. I am Grimnir, and I am the Hooded One. I am All-Father, and I am Gondlir Wand-Bearer. I have as many names as there are winds, as many titles as there are ways to die.'_

 

Odin remembers.

Odin remembers Wednesday, and the wolf’s grin on his face. He remembers grime under the fingernails and a fast car for getaways, and running from the cops with the wind in his thinning hair. He remembers cheap whiskey laced with Coca-Cola and a bitter smile on a pale face as Loki scratched at his close-cropped scalp and set fire to a dollar just to watch it burn.

Odin remembers Baldr – or no, not Baldr, but the _other_ side of the light; a man of shadows who never should have been involved at all. His own treachery lies heavy on his tongue when he tries to sleep.

He was there to pick the bones of the dead at the Civil War and to send his ravens across country and sea. He was there when cities burned and drowned; he was there to pick their pockets, hide the lady, rig the dice. He remembers a time when he could count his own true believers on one hand, and cursed them all for existing.

“Oh, m’boy,” he'd said, with a laugh ever-dancing in his one eye, “we make the most of what there is; there’s no Ragnarok coming in this land,”.

And there wasn’t.

Not for them.

 

Thor remembers.

He remembers waking to the taste of weak beer and too many cigarettes, and a strange, dry taste in his mouth that was neither mead nor blood. He remembers a leather jacket slung over slumping shoulders and grime under his nails. He’d worked as a mechanic, for a while, and then a handyman. When the shame got too much, he’d worked at seeing if a god could die from liver failure.

Turned out they couldn’t.

He put that gun between his teeth, sat on his porch, and watched the sun coming up over the trees. He wasn’t crying, but he would have been if he’d known how.

“Thor,” said a soft voice behind him. He turned to see Loki, barefoot, scrubby hair sticking up around his ears. In this world, they were not brothers – no, they were something more sacred than that. The same pantheon. Holy.

“Don’t do this,” said the Jotunn who was not his brother, with a rasp underlying the oil of his voice.

Thor looked him in the eyes, locked for a beat, questions etched in his face. Every story needs a winner and a loser. Loki raised both his eyebrows in return. Thor nodded.

His eyes had not left Loki’s as he squeezed the trigger with one enormous finger, and sprayed blood and brains all over the back wall. He fell as a crumpled ruin of a temple, his eyes empty. Loki watched, and never said a word.

 

_'Pain hurts, just as greed intoxicates and lust burns. We may not die easy and we sure as hell don't die well, but we can die. If we're still loved and remembered, something else a whole lot like us comes along and takes our place and the whole damn thing starts all over again. And if we're forgotten, we're done.'_

 

Loki remembers that the mortals forgot them, over time, and it hurt as nothing he believed nothing ever could, least of all something that had always meant so little to him. He’d lived with hunger instead of humour; spilled salt and drawn runes with greasy fingers on Formica diner table tops while Odin was buying the drinks.

“ _Cheeseburgers_ ,” he’d said distastefully when the meal was served, picking at a gherkin.

“They were out of roast boar,” Odin growled, “now eat your damn fries.”

“We were gods once,” Loki replied.

“We’re still gods, Trickster.”

Loki dropped the knife he was valiantly trying to stab his meat with, and grinned like a snake.

“No, Loki,” warned Odin, recognising the look.

Loki shrugged, and picked a gherkin from his burger before daintily laying it on Odin’s plate. But the grin didn’t dissipate, climbing out between his crooked teeth and sitting, just so, over scarred and smirking lips.

“We’re not gods, my darling _deluded_ old man,” crooned Loki in what sounded like triumph, “we’re relics. Oh, we are bedtime stories. We are become the night terrors of ancient crones and unheeded myths for children’s anthologies. You just don’t see that yet, and that will be your undoing.”

“Folks need gods,” Odin replied methodically, as he had infinite times before; for this was a world amongst many, and so this had happened as many times as there are universes to believe in. “Always have, always will. Just because we’re not in charge anymore, m’dear, doesn’t mean we’re not able to hang on. We change. We adapt. The _American_ way.”

Loki laid down his fork. “Thor,” he said coldly. He did not need to say more.

A pause.

“Yes,” said Odin, heavily. “Well. I blame myself for that.”

 

There was a world where Odin was Loki’s father; there was another where the trickster was Laufey’s son. There were worlds where they were warriors, where they were demons, where they were kings. There were a thousand where they were never wished into existence at all.

This world was something more, and tasted ripe for the taking. In this world, they were partners. In this world, the dice were loaded and the marks didn’t even believe the wolves existed. Which had suited the erudite and charming Mister World and Mister Wednesday just fine; let them play their little games of war and history and conquering nations. What matter to the sometime-gods if slaves were freed or votes were cast? And both of them remember these dreams, in other worlds, in moments when they forget what’s real - and if sometimes ‘father’ sticks in Loki’s mouth, who’s to know?

All deaths belong to Odin, in the end.

 

_'The secret is this: people gamble to lose money. They come to the casinos for the moment in which they feel alive, to ride the spinning wheel and turn with the cards and lose themselves, with the coins, in the slots. They may brag about the nights they won, the money they took from the casino, but they treasure, secretly treasure, the times they lost.'_

 

Loki was kept awake at night by bad dreams. He could remember falling, nothing else; nightmares of letting go of someone’s hand and plunging downwards far beyond the edges of the world; of waking up with the taste of ashwood and blood. Perhaps, he thought, this was where he had landed after all, and there was no climbing out again.

“You remember, don’t you?” he asked Odin, in desperation, grabbing the older man by the shirt collar and shaking him roughly. One glass eye regarded him coldly, unchanging as the man it belonged to in this everchanging world. The other blinked. “You remember them. All of them.”

“Many things I know, Low Key Lyesmith,” his father said, kissing his forehead gently, “and none of them agree, and all of them are true. And you will be our undoing.” He brushed a strand of Loki’s hair – red, black, made of nothing but air – from his face. “That was always the case.”

“We cannot choose our destiny,” Loki whispered, something stuck in his throat.

“Gods cannot. That is our blessing.”

“And then? This world?” Loki demanded, his voice cracking. “What then? What of the next? The next? The _next_?”

Perhaps he was falling still.

“Let’s see, shall we, m’boy? Let’s just wait and see.”

 

Thor awoke in a rush of breath, curled in a bed of fur and warmth like a newborn babe. _Jesus Christ, my head._ He blinked in confusion, and shook his head, clearing away words from dreams he didn’t understand. He pulled himself up to sitting, naked as a child, washed clean, the thoughts creeping out, and stretched his arms in greeting to the world.

“Brother,” said Loki from behind him, “up, you lazy oaf, Father is waiting.”

Thor turned, and just for a moment, a scarred young man in a greasy suit snarled at him like a wolf. He threw himself backwards, snatched Mjolnir from the bedsheets, and held it in front of him.

“Traitor,” he managed.

The light faded, and there was no monster, no broken gambler, but only Loki – his brother, alive, smiling, pure, whole – smirking and leaning on the doorframe.

“No," said Loki, "just me."

Thor scratched the back of his head. It was still there, and he couldn’t remember now why it shouldn’t have been.

Well, that was some relief, at least.

“I remember,” he said, as much to tell himself as Loki, words tasting ashen and unfamiliar in his mouth, like a pyre or a burning ship. He searched Loki’s face for recognition. “I _remember_ ,” he repeated hopelessly, clinging to threads of thought that were already disappearing into the mists of legends and untruth.

Loki raised an eyebrow. Delight etched on his face, he snorted.

“Honestly, after that amount of sack? I’m astounded. You probably wish you couldn’t.” Thor smiled, unsure even of why, as Loki held out a hand. “Come, Thunderer. The world waits for no man. Not even the mighty Thor.”

 

_'"They aren't gods. The way I figure it, they’re mutations. Evolutionary experiments. A little hypnotic ability, a little hocus-pocus, and they can make people believe anything. Nothing to write home about. That’s all. They die like men, after all.”_

_“They always did.”'_

 

The gods remember. They always do.

There is not a world they have not seen, not an end they have not lived. They come where we call them, and they follow us to the end of the earth when we have dragged them with us, and we repay them as we always have; we forget they ever were.

Are humans playthings of the gods, or is that the wrong way round?

They could not say.

But either way, the gods remember. They always do.


End file.
